Archive for the ‘Web Browsers’ Category.
Chromium is an open-source and webkit based browser project . The Chromium codebase is the basis for Google’s Chrome browser. Getting this installed in Ubuntu isn’t too much hassle.
Continue reading ‘Install Chromium on Ubuntu’ »
When you use a socks proxy with firefox (with SSH for instance) the dns lookups are done via your default gateway. Which makes the whole thing pointless if you’re trying to be private. This setting makes the dns lookups go out over the tunnel where they can’t be sniffed.
1. go to about:config
2. search for network.proxy.socks_remote_dns
3. Set to true, which will have the proxy server perform DNS lookups.
Want to speed up your text editting in web forms? Here’s a few quick keybindings:
Because of the netbook craze or just because you like seeing more of the web and less of the application it takes to view it, one might want to minimize the usage of screen space taken up by various firefox functions. Below are several tips for accomplishing this.
When you Ctrl+K to the Google search box in Firefox, type your terms and hit Enter, the results appear in your current tab – but it’s easy to make ‘em open a whole new tab so you don’t lose your current page.
Type about:config into the address bar, and then put the following into the filter box: browser.search.openintab. Double-click the value to change it to true.
You can also use Alt-Enter when you search to open a new tab optionally. Want more Firefox about:config magic?
Playing with uzbl, I recently created a flat text file of my bookmarks saved in ~/.bookmarks, a bit cumbersome right now, but the good part is uzbl isn’t the only browser who can open links given to it from a dmenu script.
Continue reading ‘dmenu script to open bookmarks in firefox tabs’ »
Like Vimperator for Firefox? Want something a bit smaller? Easier to config from plain text files? Well meet Uzbl. Uzbl follows the UNIX philosophy – “Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.”
Now while this all good and dandy, even with a tiling window manager, I find most WMs bad at managing many open web pages and find that more suitable for tabs within the browser, fortunate others do too and have written uzbl_tabbed.py.
This python application is a shell that is able to open and contain multiple uzbl instances in the one window using a gtk.Notebook widget essentially giving uzbl tabbing support. The parent application (uzbl_tabbed.py) uses a FIFO socket to receive commands from child uzbl instances to execute various functions in the parent application like creating a new tab, opening a tab from the clipboard, going to the next tab, closeing tab number 5, etc in the same way you normally control uzbl through its FIFO socket. There is nothing stopping you from sending commands to uzbl_tabbed.py’s socket and performing those same actions yourself either manually or automatically.
Upon start-up the uzbl_tabbed.py script reads the users uzbl config file (found at $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/uzbl/config) for any commands it is able to inherit and or load that relate specifically to uzbl_tabbed.py. After spawning a uzbl instance the parent communicates to its new child uzbl instance through its socket the bind commands that (you are able to define/change either in the application itself or in your uzbl config file) give you the ability to control uzbl_tabbed.py as you would any other external script. Remembering that uzbl_tabbed.py doesn’t listen or catch ANY keys pressed by the user but rather relies entirely from commands it binds to each child to navigate to the next tab, open new tabs, close tabs, etc.
Screenshot:
click for larger
Continue reading ‘uzbl and uzbl_tabbed.py: a browser that adheres to the unix philosophy’ »
Anyone using both Vimperator and Tree Style Tabs (great combo) will have noticed the actual “tree” organizing of sub-tabs hasn’t worked together since the Vimperator 2.0 update. Luckily there’s a fix.
This appears, on quick inspection, to be due to a ‘clash’ with vimperator’s tab number tab bindings.
Adding the following to your ~/.vimperatorrc file is the best work around.
js styles.removeSheet(true, “tab-binding”)
This will remove the option of using tab numbers.
Using urxvt / rxvt-unicode very often as my prefered terminal emulator I thought it would be nice to have clickable links. Reading through the manpage and searching in google I found out about the built in urxvt’s perl extensions and that this was possible.
Just add the following to your .Xdefaults:
URxvt.perl-ext-common: default,matcher
URxvt.urlLauncher: firefox
URxvt.matcher.button: 2
URxvt.matcher.pattern.1: \\bwww\\.[\\w-]\\.[\\w./?&@#-]*[\\w/-]
Now you just need to replace firefox with your favorite browsers startup script and choose which mousebutton should be handled. Button 2 is the middle mouse button and clicking a link with it now opens it directly in firefox without copy and paste or other timewasting things
After you’re done with the file simply run:
xrdb -all ~/.Xresources
Firefox 3 is a significant stride forward in features, but it carries with it an equally significant stride backward in performance. The stats are much better – better memory usage both at startup and over time, faster JavaScript execution, less CPU time – but the browser just felt sluggish, even when it shouldn’t. Thought that your system with a terabyte of RAM and 256 cores could make Firefox soar? It turns out that, for most users, Firefox is actually I/O-bound, in large part because of the switch to SQLite databases.
SQLite is designed to be portable and highly reliable, and it pulls this off with amazing success. However, it does this at the cost of speed. SQLite implements its own journaling system, lock contention procedures, multi-process access, and more. Since SQLite is a portable library, the only way to pull these complex feats off is through standard file I/O. As the volume of data that Firefox stores in SQLite databases grow – and as the number of tabs concurrently trying to access those databases on your system do as well – the time spent by Firefox on secure, hardware-backed I/O grows as well. And since SQLite is so cautious about synchronization, even gobs of RAM and a fast CPU can’t help; the process becomes entirely I/O-bound, particularly at the moments where it should be the most responsive (typing a URL, opening or switching tabs, and the like).
But how attached are you to the last five minutes of your browsing history, really? SQLite’s agonizingly slow access times can destroy performance – and, because of the high volume of writes, it can also destroy sectors on SSDs, USB drives, or other flash media if your profile is on one of these devices. To me, it’s worth accepting a little volatility in the event of a crash for a noticeable and welcome increase in responsiveness.
tmpfs is a virtual, RAM-backed filesystem. It’s lightning-fast, but since it’s RAM-backed, any file written to tmpfs uses precious memory while it’s there, and the entire contents of the virtual partition are lost on shutdown or crash. The good news is that these detriments can be minimized, making tmpfs a viable choice for your profile directory. This document gives some tips on how to mount your Firefox profile in a tmpfs partition while minimizing the downsides of tmpfs.
